Just before International Women's Day I was approached by a publisher of women's comics to work on creating art for an existing script. The publishers later turned around and rejected my designs because the female character (a cancer patient) wasn't "sexy" enough and they wanted it to feel more like Frank Miller's Sin City (a comic book series Alan Moore once described as "unreconstructed misogyny".)

(rejected character designs)

I don't feel that female characters shouldn't be sexy. But it tends to be the default mode for depictions of women across the media, and I had hopes that a publisher of women's comics might want to create more three-dimensional female characters.

I've noticed some illustrators and comics artists beginning to develop the way they depict female characters - on some of the blogs I follow I've started to see people experimenting with drawing women with different body shapes and sizes, different face shapes and proportions. It's good for artists to stretch themselves in this way, and it's healthy for readers to have to relate to female characters beyond just thinking "she looks sexy".

Thursday, 13 November 2014

The common, old school, ordinary man of the people, who just happens to be a public school educated ex-banker. Booooo! I'm sceptical of anyone who wants their politicians to be proficient in eating sandwiches and drinking pints - we might as well scrap the leader debates and turn the whole general election into a televised round of It's A Knockout. Curiously, in most pictures Farage wears a blue shirt, perhaps to symbolise his kinship with the struggle of the ordinary blue collar worker. He also seems to be quite fond of pin stripe suits, which tend to be favoured by psychopaths.